Here is some of my coverage of the 2012 Silicon Valley Code Camp at Foothill College in Los Altos, California where I was reporting for Dice and Dice News.

Are you one that believes that the cloud has to be this big public thing? If so, Dave Nielsen, Cloud Evangelist of CloudCamp would like to challenge you to help him create the smallest cloud.

This challenge is in the process of being met through the Silicon Valley Cloud Center, a cloud lab Nielsen helped launch last year. It is there they aimed to create the smallest usable and affordable private cloud that has all the same characteristics of a public cloud: on demand, self service, scalable, and measurable.

At the 2012 Silicon Valley Code Camp at Foothill College in Los Altos, California, Nielsen showed me the low cost prototype they would like to create as a standard “cloud in a box” solution. It’s comprised of a controller and another box to run about 10 virtual machines. Nielsen estimates it will cost a total of $1,600 to have your own private cloud.

Admittedly, this low-end cloud is not meant for a production environment, although you could run a small business on it, said Nielsen. While they’ve done some testing with this solution by loading OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus on it, they’re still going through networking and performance issues.